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Da Sweet Blood of Jesus

Spike Lee’s frenzied, urgent new film is a remake of Bill Gunn’s 1973 drama, “Ganja and Hess,” about an addiction to blood that gets transmitted to a modern black intellectual by means of an ancient African weapon. The weapon in question—a newly discovered Ashanti dagger—comes between the dapper and starchy Hess Greene (Stephen Tyrone Williams), a young Wall Street heir and a collector of African art, and the curator Lafayette Hightower (Elvis Nolasco), who is a guest at Hess’s estate on Martha’s Vineyard. After Hess drinks the blood from Hightower’s corpse, he lives in the grip of his addiction. When Hightower’s widow, Ganja (Zaraah Abrahams), comes looking for her husband, she and Hess have an instant attraction, and he initiates her into the hemophage cult. Lee augments the hectic clash of violence and sex with the pressures of intellectual disputations and the unchallenged power of wealth. The result is an outpouring of furiously expressive symbolism. Hess’s chameleon-like streak—a series of disguises that bring him to Fort Greene’s projects to slake his lust and to a small neighborhood church in Red Hook to cure it—refracts the director’s own multiple worlds and unfolds a troubled metaphysical panorama of black American life.